Ed Walker (Ed Walker)

""Organic chemistry is the chemistry of carbon compounds. Biochemistry is the study of carbon compounds that crawl." - Mike Adams"

Hmmm...about me, well I am Ed Walker, one time ICSF ChairEntity and now relegated (promoted?) to tall-guy-lurking-at-the-back and I am in the middle of my second sentence at IC doing an organic chemistry PhD. Before starting my term at Imperial I was previously incarcerated in southern Essex but I, along with many of my friends, decided that there must be more to life than Essex girls and left (emigrated?) to seek our fortunes. In a very short amount of time I ended up in the Chemistry department at this illustrious institution and found out about the society that is ICSF, now I had always been a fan of SF books but ICSF has expanded my view of ICSF by a long way.

Not a very active member in my first year (the society was a lot quieter then) I decided that becoming more involved would be a good thing and stood for publicity officer after a year spent wallpapering the college and watching the society expand its outlook and run more events I moved on to be elected as chair of vice. A manifesto of barnights and listservers was probably the key to this but a fluke event meant that I became ChairEntity on five minutes notice and had to run the society for a year, not a job for the fainthearted as keeping the committee going in roughly the same direction is quite a task! A year out in the chemical industry as part of my course (GlaxoWellcome) meant I was less involved in the next year but a comeback was staged in the following year as the committee's official scapegoat.

Finishing my degree finally in that year (five years is quite enough, thank you!) and achieving a 2:1 I decided that I had not seen enough of IC and a PhD was in order. I now inhabit a lab on the 7th floor of Chemistry working for Prof. A.G.M. Barrett on antifungal natural product synthesis. [show more]